The air was charged with a holiday atmosphere. Men and women were laughing and singing as they sipped from steaming mugs of coffee and tea; and a few were drinking from mugs that Sandy suspected contained even stronger brew.
“The race from Whitehorse is a time-honored ritual,” the judge told them. “Back in the old days, the course was even longer. From Dawson to Skagway, almost six hundred miles.”
“Good night!” Jerry said. “Those poor dogs must have worn their legs down to the shoulder.”
“As a matter of fact,” the judge went on, “Klondike Mike Mahoney used to operate a mail and freight route from Skagway to Dawson.”
“Who was Klondike Mike Mahoney?” Sandy asked.
“A rather fantastic young man who came to the Yukon during the gold rush and became a living legend.” He smiled. “You might say he was our counterpart of your Davy Crockett.”
“Hey! What are they doing?” Jerry pointed to a group of Eskimos who were laughing and whooping as they catapulted an Eskimo girl high into the air from a large animal hide stretched taut like a fireman’s net.
“That’s one of their favorite games,” the judge said. “You’ve probably played something like it at the beach—tossing a boy up in a blanket.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “But not like that. She’s better than some acrobats I’ve seen on the stage.”
Time after time, the slender Eskimo girl shot into the air, as high as twenty-five feet, like an arrow, never losing her balance. While they were watching her, Tagish Charley joined them by the fire. In his one hand he held a sheet of oiled paper on which were spread a half-dozen cubes that looked like the slabs of chocolate and vanilla ice cream served in ice-cream parlors.